Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Green Pus, a new advocacy group formed by international capital, lauds garbage and waste as profit makers that can be recycled into more garbage and waste which will create jobs to produce, distribute, sell and then collect, recycle and reproduce more garbage and waste.

A spokesman for the group said “ Garbage and waste are the backbone of our economy . Foolish “green peacers” try to protect the earth not realizing it is the exploitation and destruction of earth that brings great prosperity to humanity.”

Green Pus has adopted as its logo a photo of third world children picking through enormous piles of foul rubbish seeking food, clothing and shelter for their families, with the caption:

Without garbage these poor children would never survive!

Environmental Movement Takes Strong Antiwar Stand

A new coalition urges ecological sensibility in all future wars. It will not support any military actions unless they are performed against bio-invadable nations.

“We must only attack bio-invadable countries in future or the environmental damage done by wars will endanger all of us, even those far away from the actual killing and maiming. And our attacking forces must be diverse and multi-lingual, in keeping with a changing environmental movement that is diverse and multi lingual”

Bio-invadable nations are those far enough away that the attacking nations don’t have to worry about the pollution, toxic chemicals, maimed victims and other ecological dangers of wars affecting them.

The group was immediately nominated for a Nobel Peace prize.

Pubic - Not Public! - Option

America’s new Private Health Insurers Assurance of Control program will cover the cost of pre-surgical shaving of tax paying citizens’ genital areas with a special subsidy collected from illegal immigrants. A spokesperson for the Speaker of the House said “congress and the president regret the mistaken notion of a public option, unthinkable in our free market economy in which there is no such thing as a free lunch, a free health exam, or for that matter, when you come to think of it, an actual free market.”

Israel Justifies Killing Children In Gaza

Jewish state claims they would likely have become terrorists when they grew up and the IDF was thus protecting the nation from a future holocaust.

“These kids were certain to grow up wanting to murder innocent Jews, since they were Palestinians and we know how horribly they have treated the Jewish people, worse even than the nazis who only tried to exterminate Jews but never threatened them with mass drowning by driving them into the sea.”

The Democratic Congress and President Obama supported Israel’s action as understandable and necessary defense and the president said “I stand with Israel 100%, always have and always will, even if they might have to kill my daughters if they find out my daughters might someday become terrorists who might develop nuclear weapons and might use them to kill innocent Israeli children and might create a second holocaust.”

Congress passed a supporting resolution calling for aborting all Palestinian babies as potential future terrorists. The vote was unanimous. “We stand with Israel 100%, always have and always will “ said a spokesperson for the republican minority.

Citizen Activist Group Charged With Hate Crimes

By accusing politicians of performing as "lap dogs for corporate wealth" and calling them "sexual perverts for snuggling at the crotch of capital "and "foot fetishists for licking the boots of power", the citizen action group SCORN has been accused of hate crimes by congress, the president, major media, and organized religion.

A spokesperson for the established values coalition said “Our great nation was not built on straight talk, honesty, or calling a spade a spade. In fact, cancel that last metaphor or I could face trial, too. This kind of hate language could lead to acts of terrorism, critical thinking and other horrors too evil to even mention. They must be tried in a court of constitutional law that forbids such genocidal language. Such perversion of free speech must be dealt with by rational and serious people.”

Unlimited Violence Games Deemed Suitable For TV

The television success of kick, punch and spit-on boxing has led to the creation of even more vicious sports and the FCC has decided that the new Unlimited Violence games will be allowed on pay television. These games will introduce American audiences to live, competitive throat slashing, eye gouging and disemboweling of opponents, but also terror bombing of their families and ethnic cleansing of their neighborhoods.

“American viewers have grown tired of simply watching one man beat another senseless and they need to see actual murders and if possible, group annihilations. This is far more realistic and entertaining than kick, punch and spit on boxing and sponsors are lining up to buy time on these telecasts which will surely attract new millions to pay tv, especially if their credit cards haven't yet been canceled. “

Future plans are to include a division for battling women which would include competition involving homicidal makeup smearing, violent bitching about stupid men and tearing off wigs without without first removing hair clips. There had been a suggestion about dog and cat fighting, but producers thought viewers would find such cruelty to animals completely unacceptable.

Monday, October 26, 2009

As the economic assault on middle class America continues one government institution profits from this condition. Our division into identity groups has long been supported by corporate capital to strengthen the myths of equality and meritocracy, and to keep us competitively consuming without questioning the system of consumptive competition. But one public entity has been the greatest beneficiary of affirmative action programs .

Working class minorities and women have found the U.S. armed forces the most accessible entry point in attaining jobs and an education . The present situation and the all volunteer armed forces has meant a recruiting bonanza as people with other economic doors slammed in their faces gravitate to the military. Unfortunately this puts them on the front lines of supposed defense of a nation which has not been threatened by outside force for nearly two hundred years, since the War of 1812.

We presently spend more than 600 billion dollars a year on the military, conduct offensive wars in two nations and maintain more than 700 bases in foreign countries. Our military is a global police force for an empire which costs us trillions of dollars , thousands of lives and creates more enemies for America. Defense?

This is just one major contradiction in policies that ostensibly benefit groups suffering as outsiders by making some of their members alleged insiders. But their minority success is purchased by a majority which is failing. While some women and minorities rise in status, unemployment and debt are sinking much larger groups of citizens, obviously including minorities and women. No matter how we are ethnically , racially or sexually categorized, most of us are of an economic class kept divided by designations which become almost religious in that faithful beliefs in our differences have almost as much to do with them as material evidence for their existence.

We certainly have a murderous history of racist oppression of Africans in the worst possible attack on human rights, then continued with a warped institutional base which reduced others to sub-citizen status. But while many of us still suffer severe disadvantage , rewarding only some , and then in a contradictory fashion, is hardly the way to bring the whole society into a balance of equality and justice. As long as our economics totally negate any possibility of real equality but only a facade perpetuated by the minority of wealth with the most power, we cannot achieve a just society but one with justice for some only at the expense of everyone else .

Science clearly finds that we are one race with geographic differences in how we look but none in how we are biologically composed. Cultural differences are learned behaviors that have absolutely nothing to do with skin tone, sex, religious or ideological belief. We need a serious discussion of this to identify the enormous problems we face as a class in this political economy. Unfortunately, ruling divisions that treat us as individuals except when confined to subjugated identity groups, but collectively regard us as a massive consumer mob have so far prevented that discussion.

Among those reduced to being social outcasts, homosexuals have fought to be openly and honestly themselves and not live in shadows. Forcing people to lie about who they are is anti-human and the move towards openness is a positive step for all society. But finding this freedom in the military is a perverse blessing. That a community based on what was once called “the love that dare not speak its name” would derive liberation from being allowed to openly perform as warriors is a social pathology. Whether the president was sincere or not, his plea for equal rights by ending the policy of homosexuals remaining secretive in the service or losing their jobs is twisted political logic . And foolishness about macho warriors is more outdated than bigoted discrimination against gays and lesbians. Any child can sit at a console and push buttons that send weapons to blow up humans thousands of miles away. The Hollywood idea of war is a product of affluent image creators who wouldn't know physical combat from physical labor. But these myths must be confronted and not perpetuated by groups among us led to believe they are somehow liberated by participation in the most wretched and immoral social operation we can imagine.

Gays are not unique in being manipulated into thinking they can achieve equality only by uncritically accepting all established institutions as long as they can participate in them. These are the outcomes of every effort to advance specific groups only by advantaging select members of the group, which in our economy always means at the expense of others. But to consider it progress to be an open, honest participant in the actions of mass murder and cleansed by the diabolically deceitful name of defense is a moral tragedy .

As is too often the case, such alleged equalities are negative rather than affirmative. Being “allowed” to participate in the market place in the same destructive economy previously dominated by others, or to act as grasping, selfish and egocentric as the profiteering minority that still rules the economy, can only be seen as affirmative by a confused population. The majority of us who support continued destruction of the social and natural environment by our forced divisions into competing cross purposes need to learn that we are a common race and class, with common interests in our survival. Those will not be satisfied if we are reduced to acting as singularly identified groups , members of a ruled class endangering our future by not acting together in the present. None of us, gay, straight or neuter, should buy into this military lie, nor the crippled system it supports.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author

frank scottemail: frankscott@comcast.net

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in print in the Coastal Post and The Independent Monitor and online at the blogspot: Legalienate

Monday, October 19, 2009

In his autobiography "Break His Bones" Bradley Smith gives us a lively and infuriating review of the Holocaust dogma that has crippled intellectual freedom in the U.S.. It should be required reading for every course with an Elie Wiesel book on the class reading list. While sympathetic to Jewish suffering, it dispassionately analyzes the fantastical claims made by Holocaust eyewitnesses, including mass gassing chambers, lampshades made of human skin, soap made from Jewish cadavers, and towering geysers spurting human blood for months on end in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe. Maintaining a steady, ironic tone throughout, the author details the intellectual cowardice of college professors, the craven submissiveness of the corporate media, and the fanatical zeal of Holocaustomaniacs.

This remarkable achievement has not come without a price. Holocaust Industry fanatics routinely slander Smith, disrupt his speaking engagements, prevent circulation of his work, keep him on the brink of financial ruin, and threaten to kill him, his wife, and his children. Nevertheless, Smith persists in pointing out the wild implausibilities in the conventional Holocaust narrative, as he has for three decades, and calls for an open debate on the topic on U.S. college campuses. Though no such debate has yet taken place, his tireless efforts to give sanity a chance have left the Holocaust Industry looking increasingly ridiculous.

At the root of this mother-of-all-industries is a Judeo-centric self-obsession that simply will not face reality - or let anyone else do so either. James Baldwin explained the problem well in his famous letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Noting that the illusion of black inferiority had long served as the anchor of white identity, Baldwin told his nephew that white people couldn't help but feel alarm in the face of a black freedom movement that attacked their very sense of reality. "Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame," wrote Uncle James. "You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature." And violations of nature cannot be assimilated. "The black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar," he observed, "and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations."

Among Jews, orthodox belief in the Holocaust has functioned as an immovable pillar, so that any skepticism about mass gassing chambers threatens to bring the Temple of Eternal Victimhood crashing down upon their heads. Having long built Jewish identity around a narrative of 2000+ years of unmerited suffering culminating in "extermination" in Nazi gas chambers, organized Jewry cannot easily accept that key aspects of the story may be as much legend as factual description, as much myth as reality. Confronted by Smith's skepticism, they do not debate what they consider to be his intellectual errors, but rather, smear him as Nazi-sympathizing scum.

Though it is often claimed that "tons" of captured German documents prove beyond doubt that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews in gas chambers, in fact documents are scarce, and their interpretation is very much disputed. As a result, the Holocaust narrative has become almost solely dependent on the testimony of martyrs. But eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially from those who were held in conditions ripe for the flourishing of collective hysteria. "History is filled with stories of masses of people claiming to be eyewitnesses to everything from sexual union with the Devil to abductions by moon men in flying saucers," Smith observes. How "anti-Semitic" of him to notice.

The situation being what it is, Smith gets no support among U.S. college professors, who meekly submit to Holocaust Industry tyranny, even as they piously declare their (imaginary) belief in free speech. While they may be in favor of free speech in the abstract, as soon as they encounter the slightest doubt about homicidal gas chambers they are reduced to Holocaust Industry sound bites that divert attention from the disputed facts to the alleged sinister motives of those who seek to have them investigated.

Like Holocaust Industry lobbyists, the professors insist there can be no "other side" to the gas chamber story, because Holocaust revisionists are hateful people with an "agenda," and so cannot arrive at the truth the way the dispassionate professors allegedly do. This is the educational equivalent of Israel's claim that it can find no partner for peace, only terrorist maniacs intent on continuing Nazism by other means. If Bradley Smith doesn't realize by now that Jewish apartheid is inherently noble because mass gassing chambers are inherently credible - and vice versa - so much the worse for him. Such is the level of intellectual sophistication at U.S. colleges, now charging tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of becoming associated with them.

Given the ban on open Holocaust debate, "Break His Bones" might just as well have been titled, "Free Speech: An Autopsy." "Every institution of higher learning cooperates in the suppression of revisionist scholarship," Smith notes. "No book or periodical distributor will handle revisionist publications" and "no philanthropic organization will contribute funds to revisionist research." For Smith, this is a "spiritual" issue, not a political one, since you either want free speech "for others as well as for yourself or you don't really want it." Minds that have mastered Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche find these words impenetrable.

Here is the dismal sequence of speech suppression at U.S. universities. After Smith places an ad calling for free discussion of the Holocaust, agents of the Holocaust Industry express indignation that heretical ideas are being given a public platform. Devoid of shame, they contact the president of the university in question, "suggesting" that debating a Holocaust revisionist legitimates racism and must not be tolerated. Then they launch vicious attacks on the heretic, claiming he is lying and implying that he is a genocidal murderer at heart. They accuse the editors and advertising departments of the offending paper with having all of the worst qualities of the revisionist himself. Next, they smear all revisionists as peddlers of hatred and denounce as anti-Semitic the campus organizations that extend them invitations. This performance produces the intended effect: cowed professors and administrators maintain a disgraceful silence and campus libraries and bookstores refuse to shelve revisionist works.

Nor is this all. Thanks to Hillel rabbis, Smith reports, today's American university students are spied on with a thoroughness that puts U.S. intelligence agencies to shame. "Rabbis who work to destroy those who argue for open debate on the Holocaust stories represent a New Inquisition," and are converting the Holocaust into "a quasi-religious cult, complete with an immense crank literature of infallible texts, crazy miracles, saintly eye-witness tales of miraculous escapes from nazi devils," the entire fantastical tale protected against scrutiny "by taboos and media witch trials." Anyone who doubts receives the prescribed rabbinical punishment - "public disgrace and financial ruin."

Thirty years of such organized hysteria have conditioned Smith to expect anything but a debate on the points of contention that separate revisionists from proponents of the orthodox version of the Holocaust. His opponents never disappoint him. When he asks for substantiation of the mass gassing thesis he is asked, "Why do you defend Nazis? How can you justify Hitler? Why does it matter to you how the Jews were murdered?" When he points out the ludicrous nature of the claims that are taken seriously about homicidal gas chambers, he is told not to focus on them: "It's not the gas chambers that are important. What's important is the fact that the Jews were murdered. There are so many more important issues." When he persists in focusing on facts, he is psychoanalyzed: "What are your motives? Your real motives?" When he stands up for intellectual freedom, it is contemptuously dismissed: "Free speech? Don't try to put us on about free speech. What did the Jews ever do to you?" Discussion, debate, intellectual exchange, all are completely irrelevant: "We don't care about your fantasy about how there are no proofs that the gas chambers existed. We're past that. We know they existed. We want to know why you do it. Why the gas chambers? Why the Holocaust? Why the Jews?"

Charges of anti-Semitism are particularly easy to refute in Smith's case. He concedes that the German National Socialist state singled out Jews for special and cruel treatment, that they were stripped of their rights, forcibly relocated to ghettos, conscripted for labor, dispossessed of their property, and deported from the countries of their birth. He acknowledges that large numbers of them perished in awful conditions presided over by the Nazis. "In short," he says, "Jewish culture in Eastern Europe was destroyed during the Hitlerian regime." Such are the thoughts of what the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith calls one of the most dangerously racist men in America.

One weakness of Smith's work is its "spiritual" orientation and the uncritical anti-Communist bias that accompanies it. Smith judges historical events to be the product of "hate" projected onto human institutions, not to a clash of interests objectively in conflict. "Those who hate or believe they do," he writes, are in a struggle with their inner lives, as we all are. Projecting the struggle out into institutions and political movements is what leads to the violence, not the feelings themselves." This stance encourages Smith to gloss over important distinctions and give too much importance to his personal dislikes, which have no bearing on historical events.

For example, responding to the horrendous 911 attacks on the U.S., Smith issues a blanket condemnation against widely disparate political figures for engaging in "violence":

"With respect to killing the innocent for the acts of those who rule them, the Islamist radicals did nothing unusual. They represent an old established human tradition. They want to right what, from their point of view, are the injustices being carried out against 'their' people. That's what they all say. Hitler said it. Stalin said it. Pol Pot and Idi Amin said it. Even Che Guevarra (sic) and the pipsqueak Fidel Castro said it. They all were willing to intentionally kill the innocent for what they convinced themselves was a 'higher good.' The people who did the World Trade Centers were unique only in that they represented no nation state, but an NGO, a non-governmental organization."

What is interesting about this commentary is that it omits mention of Palestinian violence. Smith cannot be unaware of the long train of kidnappings, shootings, bombings, hijackings, and general war carried out by the PLO and Hamas. But unlike in the case of Marxist inspired movements, he omits mention of it. Why? Because, as Smith repeatedly points out, Israel is to blame for establishing an apartheid state on Palestinian land and brutally expelling as many of the indigenous inhabitants as possible, actions that make such a "terrorist" response, if not inevitable, certainly highly predictable. In other words, he puts the blame where it belongs - on the actions of the oppressor, not on the desperate measures of the oppressed to fight back. This is as it should be, and Smith should do the same vis-a-vis other oppressed groups, whether they be Nicaraguan, Cuban, Chinese, Russian, Korean, or Vietnamese.

After all, none of the figures Smith indicts above would likely accept that their policy was to "intentionally kill the innocent," and therefore it is up to each and every one of us to rationally evaluate what they actually did, rather than dismiss them as heartless mass murderers on ideological grounds. Smith prefers to ignore the distinction between oppressor and oppressed and issue a blanket indictment against both groups for engaging in "violence." But this sheds no light on history, which, after all, is a secular process, nor does it address the issue of what oppressed majorities should do to escape the brutal conditions institutionalized violence imposes on them. For such people, the issue is not hatred, but desperation. Smith nowhere addresses their plight.

For Smith, "the initiation of violence is the overriding issue." The problem with this orientation is that it overlooks the fact that violence is seamlessly integrated into all the dominant institutions of capitalist society, making it quite impossible to determine the "initiation" of violence. Under capitalism it is permissible to exclude millions of people from access to clean water, adequate food, medical care, and other basic necessities, resulting in countless unnecessary deaths. Capitalist propagandists insist this is not violence, but that a social movement dedicated to changing these priorities by displacing capitalist elites by force is violence. This is a starkly ideological definition that Smith does not bother to inspect. In fact, he uncritically supports it.

Furthermore, Smith, like Holocaust revisionists in general, is far too credulous in believing fantastical claims about socialist or Communist atrocities, whether real or imagined. Consider this episode Smith relates from the 1980s: "In Mother Jones there's a photograph of a Nicaraguan girl with the stump of one leg wrapped in bandages. Some progressive-forces group is using the photo as anti-Contra propaganda. The one-legged girl is laughing and the propagandists are asking for money. These are the same folks who did not take photographs of the one-legged girls manufactured by the Sandinistas when the Sandinistas were guerrillas . . . .their own politics are more important to them than the one-legged girls."

Here Smith uncritically equates the Contras and the Sandinistas as "guerrillas" dedicated to "manufacturing" mutilated children in the pursuit of political goals. But is this true? The Contras, composed overwhelmingly of ex-Somoza National Guardsmen famous for torture, rape, and murder, were an imperial mercenary army, never a guerrilla force, and they had no indigenous support inside Nicaragua. Their leaders were wealthy Somocistas who were given $84,000 tax-free every year by Washington to deliberately target civilians for torture and murder. There was no comparable Sandinista loyalty and policy, before or after the revolution. In fact, during the guerrilla phase the Sandinistas won the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the population by "violent" actions against high value political enemies, not against civilians in general. (After the revolution they abolished the death penalty rather than execute the men who would later form the Contras.) So if the Sandinistas were "manufacturing" one-legged girls, how does one account for their overwhelming popularity at the time among the Nicaraguan people? In fact, Smith's claim is simply untrue.

Smith is similarly dismissive of FMLN "violence" during the war in El Salvador from 1979 to 1994, when a U.S. sponsored death squad government (Salvadorean death squads were created by the C.I.A. during the Kennedy Administration) killed roughly 70,000 people, often after hideous torture, the vast majority of them civilians. Nonetheless, after reading a newspaper article about a priest in El Salvador who had joined the guerrillas, Smith characterized the situation as follows: "So the priest is going to bless the people who are killing the people for the good of the people. The usual." He neglects to point out that the people were the ones who took up arms to protect themselves against death squads created by Smith's government in Washington, and that the priest was therefore blessing these efforts at self-defense, not exercises in wanton killing, as Smith would have us believe.

"I ought never to initiate force against another person to get something I want," writes Smith in his book, "The Man Who Saw His Own Liver." He seems not to realize that this precept has no application in the lives of the hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of people who do not have the luxury of wondering what a "want" is, so preoccupied are they with securing that which they desperately need to keep death at bay for themselves and their children. (Recall that psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of human motivation deals with needs, not wants.) If they pick up a gun to protect themselves against the imperial armies and C.I.A. goon squads sent to repress and kill them, in Smith's eyes they are just as guilty of "violence" as their enemies in Washington. But this is like saying that the surgeon who cuts you open to remove a diseased organ is no better than the gangbanger who knifes you in order to steal your wallet. In fact, given the vastly greater killing carried out by imperial armies as compared to guerrilla forces, it's a lot worse than saying this.

Smith states that "the Holocaust story increasingly reads like the greatest, most successful PR campaign of the 20th century." If this is true, and it is not difficult to credit, then belief in Communism as a satanic and even more murderous force than Nazism has to be a close second. After all, from the moment of its triumph the Bolshevik revolution was hysterically smeared, accused by the capitalist press of engineering deliberate starvation, massacre, sexual communism, and hideous refinement of unspeakable torture. Bolshevik leaders were denounced as assassins and lunatics, human scum, criminals by nature, and beasts. The fledgling Soviet Union was depicted as a land of raving maniacs forcing hapless peasants to fight over carrion with dogs.

Testifying before the Congressional Overman Committee in 1919 U.S. Ambassador to Moscow David Francis claimed the Bolsheviks were killing everyone “who wears a white collar or who is educated and who is not a Bolshevik.” Madame Katherine Breshkovskaya, a famous anti-Bolshevik militant, testified that in one year of Bolshevik rule twice as many Russian men, women, and children had been killed than Russian soldiers were lost at the front during all of World War I. Other witnesses swore the revolutionary army was made up of criminals and Jews transplanted from New York’s Lower East Side. Still others insisted promiscuity was running amok, with women nationalized and roped into "free love" bureaus. The bed-hopping Bolsheviks were also alleged to be roasting their political enemies in furnaces, scalding them with steam, dismembering them on racks and hacking them to pieces with axes. Sound familiar?

The following year (1920) Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann published their study of New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution, characterizing it as “nothing short of a disaster.” Far from basing its views on fact, the Newspaper of Record had shamelessly promoted stories “dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization.” Accordingly, the Bolsheviks schizophrenically appeared in the Times' coverage as both “cadaver and world-wide menace,” depending on the imperialist needs of the moment.

“The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see," observed Merz and Lippmann. “The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.” Fabrication was routine: The Times cited fictional atrocities, repeatedly claimed the Bolshevik government was at the point of collapse, and spread panic about an imaginary threat of armed revolution inside the United States.

The Times’ newsmen were guilty of a “boundless credulity, an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions a downright lack of common sense.” Their contributions to public understanding at a time of world crisis have been “about as useful as that of an astrologer or an alchemist.”

“For subjective reasons,” Lippman and Merz went on, the staff “accepted and believed most of what they were told” by the U.S. government and “the agents and adherents of the old regime.” With the U.S.S.R. reduced to starvation and ruin they mocked Soviet leaders’ peace offers as Bolshevik subterfuge designed to “concentrate their energies for a renewed drive toward world-wide revolution,” starting with a “Red invasion of Europe” that somehow never materialized.

At the same time, in the eagerness to equate Marxism with Satanism Communist social gains have been routinely screened out of capitalist news coverage. The dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights that characterized the Stalin period are very rarely mentioned when the USSR is being discussed. It is considered axiomatic that "socialism doesn't work," so the idea that revolutionary communism actually created a better life for for the mass of people (in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba) than the miserable existence that preceded it under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists, simply cannot be entertained no matter what the facts are.

In China, where the 1949 revolution unified the country and ultimately ended mass starvation, the social gains of the Communist period were quite marked. According to work published by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen (and his associate Jean Dreze) in 1989, "Chinese efforts have been quite spectacular," but dramatic gains in raising life expectancy and quality of life levels came abruptly to an end in 1979 when market-based reforms were implemented and "the downward trend in mortality [in China was] at least halted, and possibly reversed." The results were "particularly severe" for women and female children. After 1979, there was "a steady decline in the female-male ratio in the population" and a two year decline in female life expectancy, after a period of steady growth in the pro-reform period.

Meanwhile, in neighboring capitalist India, Sen and Dreze reported, Indian death rates were even higher than in China during the famine attending the Great Leap Forward, an event that resulted in somewhere between 16.5 million and 29.5 million people starving to death, the authors conclude. Nevertheless, "as far as morbidity, mortality, and longevity is concerned, China has a decisive lead over India." Between 1949 (the year of the revolution) and 1979 "China . . . achieved a remarkable transition in health and nutrition," while "no comparable transformation has occurred in India." Therefore, as of 1979, "the life of the average Chinese has tended to be much more secure than that of the average Indian." If India had adopted China's social programs, "there would have been about 3.8 million fewer deaths a year around the middle of the 1980s." The authors do not shy away from the obvious conclusion: "That indicates that every eight years or so more people in addition die in India - in comparison with Chinese mortality rates - than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine." In short, India in its experiment with democratic capitalism starting in 1947 caused more deaths than all those attributed to Communist states in the whole world after 1917 - over 100 million by 1949 - and tens of millions more in the last three decades.

How often does this conclusion reach a mass audience in the United States? Has it ever reached Bradley Smith? And where are the New York Times headlines screaming of a capitalist murder machine running amok?

The point is that claims about tens of millions of people being deliberately murdered are very often ideological exercises designed to demonize or otherwise discredit selected enemies of capitalist empire. Therefore, stories of Communist "gulags" and deliberate Marxist mass murder campaigns should be taken with a very large grain of salt. They are all too similar to stories of soap made from Jewish cadavers and lampshades made of human skin.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Seven million jobs vanish from the economy in two years, most never to return without a multi trillion dollar public works program. American leadership stresses market profiteering as a solution to climate change , while more scientists see that as the source of a problem so critical it needs immediate action . The slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan has lasted longer than the 20th century world wars and now spreads to Pakistan , destroying more lives and draining more trillions from a nearly bankrupt USA . Tensions grow among stressed out citizens , including some of what passes for their political leadership . So what should most concern us?

IRAN?

We are continuously warned of the ominous threat represented by this nation said to be secretly preparing to annihilate all life on earth, or at least its most perennially menaced tribe . Ahmadinejad is supposedly out to exterminate Jews with nuclear weapons that do not exist. They certainly exist in Israel but are never mentioned in our “don't ask don’t tell” policy towards the Jewish apartheid state. With 70 million people, Iran spends some $7 billion annually on its military. Israel spends double that amount, with one tenth that population . The United States spends $600 billion , or 85 times more than Iran . Obviously, Israel and the USA are pacifist nations while Iran is a military monster. Also, atheists wrote the bible and pimps believe in free love.

Given the hysterical ravings of corporate puppets posing as our government and then repeated by their media stenographers , we can be forgiven for consuming intellectual garbage and believing it is informational health food.

America’s Israeli lobby has been hysterically demonizing Ahmadinejad and Iran for years now. Most recently , after thousands of AIPAC minions lobbied for it, congress - America’s not Israel’s - approved action authorizing government divestiture from companies invested in Iran’s petroleum and gas sectors. Then the Secretary of State - America’s not Israel’s - argued for a “diplomatic” approach so “we gain credibility and influence ...to make a sanctions regime as tight and crippling as we would want it to be.” Why should we “cripple” Iran, which has done nothing to us while suffering American meddling in its political process for generations? It dates back to the assumption of power by the Islamic revolution which overthrew an American created despot . But it became worse when Ahmadinejad hosted an international conference on the holocaust with some participants who would be imprisoned in their own nations for merely suggesting a critical view of an historic event. Since then the hatred for him, the distortions of his public comments and the charge he was embarked upon the annihilation of the Jewish people has become a dementia with the potential of plunging the entire world into unimaginable horror . This terrible threat needs to be dealt with by rational leadership, if any still exists. There is reason for doubt.

The president who supposedly represents change speaks out of both sides of his mouth, making occasional statements of reason to attempt balance with the usually irrational , but the possibility of lunatic action by other leaders still looms . Most of the world can see through the blatant lies and hysterical suppositions of those who claim imminent extermination if Iran is not destroyed, but it is more difficult to overcome consciousness control exercised here by the lobby and its employees in U.S. government and media. While some confused and disoriented Americans are screaming over alleged socialist policies taking their hard earned money, a minority ruled government is moving toward stealing far more than some angry family's christmas club fund.

As more of our people suffer joblessness, unpayable debt, unaffordable health care and sink into poverty , our heads are filled with gibberish about a threat from nonexistent Iranian weapons . We should remember the charges lodged against Iraq by the same political forces that are trying to get us into another murderous fiasco. They clamor for more blood to avoid what they devoutly believe is an eternal assault on Jews which seems to date back to a time even before there were Jews. Some compare the situation to Viet Nam in that we get more deeply into an un-winnable war, as though its immorality doesn't matter and only victory assumes importance. But even without moral consideration - essential in our immoral system - the wastefully brutal madness of conducting war while our nation suffers crippling social problems shows deteriorating ability of leaders to understand material reality. It calls for a genuine democratic intervention, something that presently seems beyond American capacity .

What is to be done when a war making president receives a peace prize, and this after condemning a report which called Israel's atrocity in Gaza exactly what it was? When media outlets purvey such disinformation that much of the public is reduced to believing socialists rule the USA ? An individual in our condition would be sedated and put in a padded cell but our problem is social. Despite our cultural shaping as isolated individuals, we need to create democratic social action to reverse the process by which we live, but will not be able to survive if it continues .

A spineless president who bends to minority power is a problem but could become a solution if democracy brings real majority control . Obama will follow orders coming from power, which is why he obeys the war making class. If there is to be peace and a better world, real democracy needs a wake up call among the people. An aroused public needs to provide a choice that reflects majority values and interests or minorities will not only continue ruling Obama, but make things much worse than they are now . Is that possible? Don’t ask, just make it impossible.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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